The trouble started after my husband reported a strange Zoom call at work. The company he worked for was a tech company that dabbled in defense contracting. I know all tech companies make weapons, but I didn’t want him working on that kind of stuff. He never promised he wouldn’t. He said the line between weapon and not-weapon was becoming increasingly porous, or something to that effect. Perhaps that was the first sign I would lose him.

Anyway, the Zoom call that ended my marriage occurred between him and a coworker who kept her camera off. He had never met her before. He told me her name. It was an unusual name. I’d never heard it before. If I said it now, you’d recognize it as a string of priming words. So I’m not gonna say it. I do respect the law, despite what I’m about to ask you to do for me.

During the call, the black screen that held the text of the coworker’s pseudonym printed on it would flash white. My husband described it like a flicker. At first he thought it was a glitch, but the white flicker would last longer and longer until my husband was able to read faint words on the screen. The first word was clearly RELAX in all caps. He couldn’t read the rest. He asked the person he was on the call with about it. She said she couldn’t see it and that she didn’t know what he was talking about. My husband is not normally paranoid, but he had the feeling he was being lied to. So he recorded the call. Afterward, he was able to play it back in slow motion and read the remaining thirty-five words that flickered on the screen.

Of course I’m not going to say them out loud. At the time I had no idea they were so dangerous. They didn’t appear to have any meaning behind them. I thought it might be something generated by an unsophisticated chatbot. The words had the shape of sentences: subjects, objects, verbs, and periods at the end. But they held no apparent meaning.

He repeated the words again and again the next few days, so I have them memorized by now. For some reason I was immune to that particular string. But he wasn’t. A week later, out of the blue, he asked me for a divorce. I demanded to know why. He said he didn’t know, only that a switch had flipped inside him.

A year later, his company unveiled a new product, one you’ve heard of. They called it Hygeia, after the Greek goddess of health. Hygeias were short bits of text that, once read, could initiate new neural pathways via the optic nerve. They had already been shown to cure things like eczema and Crohn’s disease. Later we would all find out they could be engineered to induce mental illnesses and anti-social behavior as well. Upon learning that, I called my ex. Normally I would have sent him an email or a text message, but such communications had since become unsafe as weaponized Hygeias stalked inboxes.

I was surprised when he answered after two rings. We had a polite conversation. I asked him if he thought he had been exposed to a Hygeia prototype during that call with his coworker. He said he was certain he was. I asked him if there was any possibility of an antidote to the Hygeia he’d been exposed to. He said he didn’t think so and he wouldn’t want one even if there was. I asked him if he was angry that he had been experimented on in this manner. He said he could understand why I might be angry, but he wasn’t angry. Participation in these types of experiments were a condition of his employment. He reminded me about the time he got his brain scanned and how they made a model of his ear canal. Yes, I remembered the ear canal experiment, I told him, but the difference there was that he knew he was participating in research in advance. Informed consent, I said.

He reminded me of the time the company had arranged an active shooter drill, only they hadn’t told him it was a drill until after. Well, I replied, I always thought that was out of line. He disagreed, the simulated shooting had made him safer in a way that foreknowledge would have prevented. And I was pretty mad at this point in the conversation, even though he was calm, so I asked: and how did ruining your marriage make you safer?

He was silent for a long time. He said he had already asked his boss about this. The Hygeia he had been exposed to had been a prototype for general life optimization. He hadn’t just gotten divorced, he had also given up candy and taken up rock climbing. He truly was happier now.

Well that’s not fair, I told him. I’m so unhappy. It didn’t work on me. Why didn’t it work on me? I was yelling at this point, I’m ashamed to say. I’d always had a temper. It’s worse when I drink, though I’m mostly sober now. I can’t just blame the end of my marriage on the Hygeia. It was my fault too. And he probably was better off without me. But why did he get to optimize his life while I got nothing? I was lonely and my sweet tooth was worse than ever. I have no interest in rock climbing.

I’m sorry you’re immune, he said. Truly I am.

Then find me another, I told him. And then I clarified: another Hygeia. Get me one that will fix me. I need it more than you.

But he wouldn’t. They’re illegal now, he kept saying over and over again until he hung up on me.

So this is what I need help with. This is why I’ve called the hotline. Anyone listening, I need a Hygeia. I know they are still out there, despite the ban. I don’t even need one that will fully optimize my life. I just need one that will, as my ex put it, flip the switch. I still love him and I want to stop. I know the risks and I’m willing to take them. Someone out there knows the words that will heal me. Please send them my way.